Increasingly, tasks are being completed by workers who are located at a site that is remote to the work location. This saves people time and money commuting, increases productivity, and reduces stress therefore offering a host of intangible benefits to society.
In one application, medical professionals may wish to distribute the tracked coordinates of tools and other objects within some field of operation to two or more different systems that will be in use during surgeries. It is important that the distributed track information not be too old when it is used to make critical decisions, where coordinates that are too old could lead to making incorrect decisions or displaying invalid information. Examples include how to position a robotic arm relative to some position of a tool during a surgical procedure and where to display the position of the tool relative to critical structures (such as arteries or tumors) in medical images.
Because the different systems consuming tracked object coordinates are typically connected via an Ethernet network, there are at least two sources of error when determining whether a coordinate is safe to use, including differences in the values of the clocks between the two systems and latency due to network communications.
Conventional approaches for determining network latency and clock offset between two or more systems have considerable shortcomings and are not necessarily suitable for use when computing devices are separated by an Ethernet network, wireless communication protocols and/or the Internet. It would be desirable to have a system and method for determining network latency and clock offset that provides an upper bound on these values and makes it feasible to use Ethernet connections or even Internet connections for mission critical communications where timing is critical.